About Haiti: L' énigme du retour, by Dany Laferriere

These days –but hasn’t it always been like that? [1]-, when you get news about Haiti, it is always bad news: political unrest, hunger riots, gang violence... Then the earthquake, then the international help so disorganized that almost a year after the earthquake most of the population of Port-au Prince is still living into one of these tent slums…then the cholera and again, political instability. A doomed place, a living hell, that’s what Haiti looks like these days from the outside.

And yet, what a great nation: Maroons [2]Haitians led riots and battles against French soldiers and finally won their independence in 1804; the first independant Black-led country; then, they fought again against the French and Spanish that tried to submit the young nation. Its first Haitians rulers like Dessalines tried to build a democratic and egalitarian society.

Haiti has also a rich literary history, both in poetry and fiction; authors like Jacques Roumain in his Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944) have given voice to the people of Haiti, exposing the injustices and cruelties of their society. And because of the long reign[3] of the Duvaliers father and son, many Haitians intellectuals were forced to leave the country and build a new life in France, Quebec, or in the U.S, creating a literature of the diaspora.

Dany Laferriere is one of these intellectuals forced to live in exile (since 1976). Laferriere lives in Montreal and shares his time between writing articles for local newspapers, writing books and now directing movies. He became famous in the literary world in 1985 with his first provocative novel entitled Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (how to make love with a nigger without getting tired) in which he was exploring the relationships between Whites and Blacks in Montreal and the way they dealt with sexuality. After this one he published more novels, some as provocative as his first one, some reflecting on the questions of identity and exile (themes also present in its first novel). 

For some reason, I wasn’t really attracted to his writing (I had this image of a show-off kind of writer, the kind that would exploit trendy topics and styles to become famous) until he published in 2009 L’énigme du retour[4]. Here, I have to say that I certainly behaved as the snobbish French I tend to be more than often since it is the fact that this particular book received the prix Medicis[5] that made me change my mind about its writing. If it had received the Medicis, it certainly had something more interesting in it than des parties de jambes en l’air [6]between Blacks and Whites[7]!

And indeed, it has. The novel is rooted in the Haitian experience of exile, loss of one’s self, guilt of having left, of not doing enough for those still living there…As a kind of exilée, I was particularly moved by some of Laferriere’s reflections on exile, like the following passage, where the ancient opposition between nomads and sedentary people appear to be still very alive and true:

                “En fait, la veritable opposition n’est pas

                entre les pays, si differents soient-ils,

                mais entre ceux qui ont l’habitude

                de vivre sous d’autres latitudes

                (meme dans une condition d’infériorité)

                Et ceux qui n’ont jamais fait face

                à une culture autre que la leur.

               

Seul le voyage sans billet de retour

peut nous sauver de la famille, du sang

et de l’esprit de clocher. »[8]

As you can see from  this excerpt, Laferriere has used a poetical prose to tell about his loss ; for those of you familiar with the French Martiniquais writer Aime Césaire, it certainly reminds you of his masterpiece Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1943), entirely written in a poetical prose very influenced by  Surrealism[9].  The topic is also similar, since Césaire was describing the conflicting feelings of a Martiniquais young man going back to his island after having studied in Paris. In Césaire’s poetry, the topics of alienation and anger against the White oppressor were mixed with an ode to his own Creole culture, as if the exile had made him aware of the beauty and richness of his island and its people.

So, Laferriere’s style is not unique but it is still a powerful device to move his readers and tell his story.

Because a story it is: the narration is mostly linear, with some reminiscences from childhood or other past times.  The narrator- the author’s literary twin- is awaken in his sleep by a phone call from a hospital in the Bronx letting him know that his estranged father has just died. Then the literal and psychological journey of the narrator begins; first, he drives to a remote place in Quebec, to try to see one of his friends; then he takes the train to New-York to see to his father’s funerals and then, finally, he feels the urge to go back to Haiti and to his father’s native village. En route, he meets with some of his father’s old friends, then his mother, sister and young nephew still living in Port-au Prince and also with some Voodoo powerful spirits.

One of the main strings of the novel is the son’s attempt to reconcile with the figure of his estranged father: we don’t learn much about him, only bits and pieces that give us the portrait of an intellectual who fled Duvalier’s dictatorship, living behind him a wife and children who barely knew him. Then, living in New-York, he seems to have turned into a kind of hermit, even refusing to meet his adult son. And yet his friends speak highly of him, making it even more difficult for the narrator to come into terms with his grief and loss.

The first part of the novel is mostly self-centered, the narrator being absorbed in his anger and grief and reflections on exile; while in the second part, he opens up to the Haitian reality, reconnecting with his native land. Here Laferriere’s poetical prose beautifully and painfully describes the Haitian’s hardships , like in the pages where Laferriere sees every morning, from the window of his hotel room, in the slum perched on the hill facing his room, a very young girl, always the first awaken, setting up the fire for the first meal of the day. This young girl, modern Sisyphus condemned to a life of poverty and violence with not much of a prospect, where is she now? Did she survive the earthquake?

Here is one of Laferriere’s talents in this book: making his characters very alive but without the heaviness of social realism. On the contrary, his poetical prose enables him to draw his characters and the places he visits, in a kind of Impressionist way: with small strokes of ink, of words:

                “La nuque fragile

                des jeunes femmes

                contraste avec

                leurs mains calleuses.

                C’est toujours la main

    qui révèle nos origines sociales »[10]

Or this, when he is in the Haitian countryside:

« La démarche indolente

d’une vache

à  sa promenade du soir.

La nuit devient

chagallienne. »[11]

Day after day, the narrator seems to “reroot” himself to his country, its pace and traditions. To the point that he finally reaches the end of his physical and spiritual journey.

L’enigme du retour  is an essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Haitian people whether in Diaspora or in Haiti. That is the splendor of literature: it drags you into someone else’s existence as no non-fiction book or documentary will ever be able to do.

[1] Since its independance bravely fought for by Maroons slaves, it seems that Haiti has rarely had the chance to rest from either natural disaster or man-made disasters (dictatures, repressions, corruption, poverty…)

[2] Escaped slaves.

[3] From 1957 to 1986. Papa Doc and Baby Doc ruled as dictators, having their militia (les tontons macoutes) killing about 30.000 people.

[4] “The return: an enigma.”

[5] One of the most important French literary prizes.

[6] Saying for: having sex, literally: legs up games…

[7] And having  experienced  them myself during my student life, I didn't feel the need to read about it, there wasn’t anything “exotic” about it anymore…

[8] “In fact, the true opposition is not

       between countries, as different as they can be,

       but between those who are used

       to live under other latitudes

       (even in an inferior [social] condition)

       and those who have never have to face

       a culture other than theirs.

       Only a journey without a return ticket

       can save us from family, blood

       and  parochialism”.

[9] It is Andre Breton himself, while waiting in Martinique for a ship to take him to New-York –where he lived until the end of WII- that “discovered” Aime Cesaire’s work and helped him get published later in Paris.

[10] “The fragile nape

          of young women

          contrasts with

          their callous hands.

           It is always the hand

          that reveals our social origin”

[11] The indolent gait

          of a cow

          during her evening stroll.

           The night is becoming

           Chagall-like”

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La Vie devant soi (Life before us) by Romain Gary.

Here is the incipit of the novel:

"La première chose que je peux vous dire c'est qu'on habitait au sixième à pied et que pour Madame Rosa, avec tous ces kilos qu'elle portait sur elle et seulement deux jambes, c'était une vraie source de vie quotidienne, avec tous les soucis et les peines. Elle nous le rappelait chaque fois qu'elle ne se plaignait pas d'autre part, car elle était également juive. Sa santé n'était pas bonne non plus et je peux vous dire aussi dès le début que c'était une femme qui aurait mérité un ascenseur."

The first thing I can tell you is that we lived on the sixth floor and that, for Madame Rosa, with all the pounds she was carrying around and only two legs, it was a real source of daily life, with all its worries and sorrows. She would remind us of that each time she wasn't complaining otherwise, because she was also Jewish. Her health wasn't good either and I can also tell you right away that she was a woman who would have deserved an elevator.

As you may have already guessed, Romain Gary (and under his aka name of Emile Ajar) is one of my favorite writers. Romain Gary deeply moves me as few other writers do: chez Gary, you encounter a fragile blend of ever burning indignation against injustice, ignorance, racism, stupidity; a ferocious irony against himself and most of the humanity, an explosive combination of hope and despair that give us some of the most beautiful pages of French literature.  

Gary liked to tell the story of a chameleon: you put it on a red blanket, he turns red; on a green blanket, he turns green; on a blue blanket, he turns blue; on a plaid, he explodes. Romain Gary is a lot like the chameleon of his story. Born to a Jewish single mom in Vilnius, he already had experienced several lives before arriving to Nice in 1928 (he is then 14): his real one, the one of a Jewish little boy raised by a single mom in a very anti-Semitic environment (Russia then Poland); and the many ones his mother was dreaming aloud for him: that he would become famous, as a French ambassador, or a French painter, or, even better (and safer[1]) as a French writer… His adult life would be no different: a Resistance fighter during the war (as a pilot in the RAF), a French consul in several countries (and more notably, in America, in Los Angeles), a film director and of course, at the same time, a very popular French writer. And, to this day, the only one to have won twice the Prix Goncourt; under his “true” name, first (for Les Racines du Ciel, in 1957) and then, under his alias, Emile Ajar, in 1975, for La Vie devant Soi. Five years later, he would end his chameleonic life by committing suicide.

A few nights ago, I finished reading La Vie devant Soi; I hadn’t read it again since I was in high school. For a long time, I favored La Promesse de l’Aube  and some other purely Gary pieces but La Vie devant soi is undeniably worth rereading and keeping on your bedside table. 

It is the story of two unforgettable characters, one at the beginning of his life, Momo (Mohammed), a young Arab kid, a son of a bitch (literally), that is being raised by an old Jewish lady, Madame Rosa, a former prostitute  and Auschwitz survivor, that now takes care of the children of  the Belleville neighborhood’s whores. Momo is the only narrator and you have to wait until the last page to understand to whom he is telling his story, aside from the reader. He is a street smart kid, who does his best to help Madame Rosa end her life up with dignity. But the most remarkable thing about Momo is the style Gary uses to make him talk: a very elaborate kind of literary spoken French that conveys the best of Gary/Ajar’s irony and humor and the kind of improbable French that could be spoken by an uneducated but smart and sensible kid. Momo wants to be a writer, like Victor Hugo, whom he has heard of by his old friend monsieur Hamil, a retired rug seller who tries to teach him a bit of religion but very often confuses the Koran with Les Miserables! And, most of all, he is in need of affection, of love. In this, he is typical of Ajar's/Gary's characters who all are desperately in need of affection, tenderness; like the main character of the novel Gros-Calin, Michel Cousin, who rescued a python and keeps it in his Parisian flat as his pet, for he needs some "human contact"...

As for Madame Rosa, she is probably one of the most touching and beautiful characters of the French literature. If the novel is a kind of coming of age for Momo, it is also a novel about elderliness, decrepitude, loneliness, death. And Gary depicts it all in both an intimate and crude way: Gary doesn't spare his readers with the physical decrepitude (we see Momo and Madame Lola cleaning Madame Rosa, dressing her up, changing her sheets...), but at the same time, because we see it all through the eyes of Momo - for whom the elderly lady is certainly an adoptive mother-, Madame Rosa, in her already lost battle against death, always manages to keep her dignity and her actions, which, otherwise, could be seen as pathetic, show on the contrary a sort of grandeur d'ame, retain some of this resistance spirit that was so important to Gary: like in the scene in which she gets dressed in her whore's clothes that do not fit her anymore (she has become obese), puts make-up, takes her purse and starts pacing up and down in her room as if she was still on the sidewalk (2).
The only desire that Madame Rosa has left is to die with dignity, thus not being sent to an hospital where she would be at the mercy of doctors who would force her to live a life of a "vegetable".Therefore, she asks Momo to help her die in what she calls her "trou juif" ("Jewish hole"), as she calls her cellar that she has transformed into a hiding place, because, as she puts it at the beginning of the novel, "depuis que je suis sortie d'Auschwitz, il ne m'est arrive que des malheurs" (since I left Auschwitz, I only had bad luck")... She goes down to her refuge from time to time, when she loses her mind and thinks that the French police can still show up at her door and take her to the Vel d'Hiv to send her to the German "foyers".
Here is another aspect of La Vie devant Soi worth noticing: Gary, through Momo's voice, gives a crude and caustic version of History. Here is how Momo tries to sum up the Shoah:

Madame Rosa, quand elle avait toute sa tete, m'avait souvent parle comment monsieur Hitler avait fait un Israel juif en Allemagne pour leur donner un foyer et comment ils ont tous ete accueillis dans ce foyer sauf les dents, les os, les vetements et les souliers en bon etat a cause du gaspillage"

"madame Rosa, when she has all her mind, would often tell me how mister Hitler had made a Jewish Israel in Germany to give them a "foyer" ["foyer" in French means both "home" and "fireplace"...] and how they all had been welcome in this foyer except for the teeth, bones, clothes and shoes in good shape for fear of wasting"

We also find in this novel Gary's love for the outsiders, people broken or so different that they can't fit anywhere but in the neighborhood of Belleville, mostly populated by Arabs, Africans, Jews. Colorful characters inhabit the novel, like Madame Lola, a former Senegalese wrestler turned into a drag queen with a big heart; or Monsieur N'da Amedee, an illiterate pimp who asks madame Rosa to write his letters to his family back in Cameroon; letters in which he says he is studying civil engineering... The Belleville neighborhood created by Gary is hardly realistic, it is more a contemporary and Parisian version of the shtetl from the yiddish folkstales. The other Parisians,  the "French", only appear later on in the novel and I won't say anything about it since I don't want to spoil the end for those who haven't read it yet.


When the novel was published in 1975, almost nobody had a clue that Gary was its true author. Most of the critics believed the fable that Gary had imagined: that Emile Ajar was his nephew's pseudonym and that yes, the young writer was indeed very talented. The very few among the critics that felt something was wrong were tempted to attribute the novel to Raymond Queneau, but nobody thought of Romain Gary as the true writer. Even when the novel was awarded the prix Goncourt, he continued the farce and his nephew, although reluctantly, kept pretending to be Emile Ajar. It is only after his suicide that the fraud was revealed in a posthumous text: Vie et mort d'Emile Ajar (life and death of emile Ajar), in which Gary tells the whole story.
It seems hard, now, when looking back, to not be stricken by the similitude in the style and topics between the novels signed Gary and those signed Ajar (4 novels: Gros-calin, La vie devant soi, l'angoisse du roi Salomon, Pseudo); of course there are differences but the soul is the same; it is the same disillusioned irony, the same love for the humanity and the same rage, anger at her endurable ability to self-destruction. 
 Through the mask of Emile Ajar, Gary reinvents himself one last time as a young and promising writer (he is 61 when La Vie devant soi is published); may be as an attempt to escape his own dibbuks.

---

[1] Gary writes in his romanced autobiography La Promesse de l’Aube that, although he seemed to be a gifted young painter, her mother had him quit completely this art when she learnt about Van Gogh…
(2) "Je vous jure que Madame Rosa a poil, avec des bottes de cuir et des culottes noires en dentelle autour du cou, parce qu'elle s'etait trompee de cote [...]je vous jure que c'est quelque chose qu'on peut pas voir ailleurs [...]." (I swear that seeing Mrs Rosa naked, with her leather boots and some black underwear around the neck because she got confused, I swear it is something you can't see anywhere else)